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Chinatown Stabilization Zone: Our Right to a Community
by Alice Leung
posted 9/7/06
We have the right to our community.
This is the underlying feeling of Chinatown residents and members of the Greater Boston Chinese community alike when we discuss potential threats to Chinatown’s future. With more than 1100 luxury housing units already built or approved in the neighborhood, and hundreds more in the pipeline, gentrification is becoming a household word. And more than half of the “affordable units” promised by these developments are unaffordable to Chinatown residents.
Tenants of subsidized housing are not safe either. In the past two years, CPA has become involved in seven developments where tenants were threatened with major rent increases, and some have already been displaced. Five out of seven were subsidized “affordable housing” projects.
Meanwhile, we face a new onslaught of luxury high-rise development proposals which continue to violate the goals and guidelines of the Chinatown Community Plan: at the Jacob Wirth site, on Kingston Street, and in the ten-to-twenty acre Chinatown Gateway area (trickily renamed “South Bay” by city planners).
What will become of Chinatown? And why, after improving Chinatown for more than a hundred years, is our right to a community less important than ensuring maximum profits for big developers?
We need to demand and create a Chinatown Stabilization Zone, a serious, multi-pronged strategy to stabilize the working class residential core while improving and growing Chinatown.
What can we do to stabilize this community?
- Organizing to keep people in their homes and community.
- Supporting development that follows the community vision and the Chinatown Community Plan
- Reforming citywide housing and development policies to stabilize Boston’s working class neighborhoods
